Category Archives : Last week in Azure

19

Mar

Last week in Azure, we were at the Rice Oil and Gas HPC conference showing how high-performance computing in the cloud is helping companies in that industry get more done. This week, we’ll be at GDC 2018 showing game developers how Azure can handle the management of their gaming platforms so that they can focus on what they do best: make games that make headlines. Week after week, we’re demonstrating how Azure is the cloud for all.

Now in preview

New machine-assisted text classification on Content Moderator now in public preview – Content Moderator enables you to create a complete, configurable content moderation lifecycle by combining automated moderation with human reviews and workflows. Going beyond existing technology that flags profanity terms, the text classification feature helps detect potentially undesired content that may be deemed as inappropriate depending on context. In addition, it can recommend a human review of the content. The text classification feature is in preview and supports the English language.

12

Mar

Last week, it became even more evident that Azure is the best place for all of your applications and data with numerous announcements about investments that dramatically expand the choice and ROI of moving your SQL Server and open source applications to Azure. But these investments aren’t just about Azure. They deliver deeper platform consistency across on-premises and cloud with a rich open source application framework and database support, and expanded cost-savings for Microsoft customers.

Announcing new milestones for Microsoft Cognitive Services vision and search services in Azure – Microsoft Custom Vision service, now available in public preview on the Azure portal, makes it possible for developers to easily train a classifier with their own data, export the models and embed these custom classifiers directly in their applications, and run it offline in real time on iOS, Android and many other edge devices. In addition, Bing Entity Search, which developers can use to identify the most relevant entity based on searched terms and provide primary details about those entities is now generally available on the Azure portal.

26

Feb

Now is a great time to learn more about Azure Cosmos DB through seven-part technical training series that started rolling out recently. The first part provides a technical overiew, and the second part on how to create a more intelligent and responsive globally distributed serverless application. Both are available now for on-demand viewing. You can join Part 3 live for an overview of both Graph API and Table API on Tuesday this week (10:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time, UTC-8). Subsequent parts are rolling out weekly through the end of March. Learn more and register for all of them here: Azure Cosmos DB Technical Training Series.

Now in preview

Monitor network connectivity to applications with NPM’s Service Endpoint Monitor – public preview – Network Performance Monitor (NPM) introduces Service Endpoint Monitor in preview, which integrates the monitoring and visualization of the performance of your internally hosted & cloud applications with the end-to-end network performance. You can create HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and ICMP based tests from key points in your network to your applications, allowing you to quickly identify whether the problem is due to the network or the application.

19

Feb

On Wednesday, Microsoft CVP, Charlotte Yarkoni announced Microsoft for Startups, a new program that delivers access to technology, go-to-market and community benefits that helps startups grow their customer and revenue base. Of note, the program provides startups with up to $120,000 in free Azure credits, enterprise grade technical support and development tools – supporting the languages of their choice, such as Node.js, Java and .NET.

The Go gopher has cause to celebrate as the Azure SDK for Go became generally available, including an Azure for Go developers documentation hub that brings together quickstarts, code samples, and API reference to manage and interact with Azure services from your Go applications.

Now in preview

Preview of Log Alerts feature for Application Insights – You can now create alerts that automatically run log queries at regular intervals from Azure Log Analytics and Application Insights. If the results of the log query match particular criteria, it will create an alert record and automatically run one or more actions to proactively notify you of the alert, or invoke another process, such as running runbooks using Action Groups.

12

Feb

Several of the items highlighted below focus on serverless solutions where you don’t need to provision and manage any servers so that you can take your mind off implementing infrastructure. Building a serverless application on Azure using services like Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and Azure Cosmos DB frees you to focus on what’s truly unique about your solution.

Last week, I published a special three-part episode series of Azure Friday that features Donovan Brown and Ralph Squillace exploring the open source tool chain that enables container-native, microservice-oriented app development & delivery in Kubernetes. While you’re at it, be sure to listen to last week’s Azure Podcast, which featured Kubernetes co-founder Brendan Burns.

Now generally available

Azure M/B/V3-series VMs are now generally available in UK – Azure M/V3/B-series of VM sizes are now available in the UK South region. M-series is perfectly suited for your large in-memory database workloads like SQL Server with the In-Memory OLTP functionality and other contenders in this space. Dv3 and Ev3 VMs are some of the first VMs to enable nested virtualization and Hyper-V containers. B-series VMs provide the lowest cost option for customers with flexible vCPU requirements.

05

Feb

Last week in Azure, Azure Event Grid, a fully managed, scalable and flexible event routing service became generally available. Event Grid enables you to build reactive, event-driven apps with a fully managed event routing service using a publish-subscribe model to connect data sources and event handlers, automate operations, and integrate applications.

In addition, Ansible is now pre-installed in Bash in Cloud Shell. Ansible is an open-source product that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. By using Ansible, you can provision virtual machines, containers, and cloud infrastructures. You can also use Ansible to automate the deployment and configuration of resources in your environment.

29

Jan

Last week in Azure, several announcements were made for Zone Redundant capabilities now in public preview that build on Azure Availability Zones. In addition, new backup and update capabilities make it easier to manage and help protect your virtual machines. There’s also a new, intuitive and simplified onboarding experience for Azure Site Recovery service for VMware to Azure.

Now in preview

Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets now available in public preview – Zone Redundant Virtual Machine Scale Sets bring the scalability and ease of use of scale sets to availability zones by automatically spreading your virtual machines across availability zones. You don’t need to worry about distributing VMs across zones, choosing which VMs to remove when scaling in, etc.

Azure Zone Redundant Storage in public preview – Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) greatly simplifies development of highly available applications by storing three replicas of your data in different Availability Zones, with inserts and updates to data being performed synchronously across these Availability Zones. This enables you to continue to read and write data even if the data in one of the Availability Zones is unavailable or unrecoverable. ZRS is built over Availability Zones in Azure which provide resilience against failures

16

Jan

The first full work week of 2018 was a light week for new Azure functionality since everyone was returning from the holidays, but that won’t last for long.

Headlines

#Azure #SQLDW, the cost benefits of an on-demand data warehousing – Learn how you can move from an on-premises static and monolithic data warehouse costing US$28k per month to an elastic Hub & Spoke data warehouse in the cloud optimized for performance and accessed by thousands of users with a potential cost saving of 50 percent.

08

Jan

As we ushered in 2018, our industry was busy responding to an industry-wide, hardware-based security vulnerability related to CPU data cache timing. We updated the Azure infrastructure to address this vulnerability at the hypervisor level. You can get more details about the steps taken to address this vulnerability here: Securing Azure customers from CPU vulnerability.